Kanine Records For those of us of a certain age who remember when school dances had a strict four-fast-songs-then-one-slow-one policy, the memory of bouncing around to "Let's Hear It for the Boy" with the anticipation of "One More Night" or "Take My Breath Away" still makes our palms sweat with hormonal anxiety.

Cold spell When I am finally able to get through to the cell phone of In Solitude's tour manager, they have emerged from a massive dust cloud, their metal-mobile finding civilization after a long spell traversing the deserts of Arizona with no idea where they are going.

Revenge of the Nerds ADAM YAUCH, a/k/a MCA, was likely inspired to pen those words, that appear in a tossed off couplet in the middle of what would wind up being one of the band’s final singles, by his immersion in the world of illness.

Has our lust for convenience turned rock and roll into background music? Most people seem content to toss into the void of obscurity the record-store clerk and even the record-label executive, letting them join the silent-movie matinee idol and the jazz-era singing star on the slow-moving boat of the damned-to- irrelevance.

Still sailin’ Most bands tend to take credit for their successes while chalking up their failures and struggles to a cruel and unforgiving musical environment — but hardcore punk legends Bad Brains aren't most bands.

Interscope/Live Nation (2012)
There was a time in the mid-'90s when it seemed that Madonna was finally acting her age: with the 1994 release of "I'll Remember" and the subsequent greatest-ballads collection Something To Remember, it seemed as if the Material Girl was resigned to a lifetime of mature songcraft and age-appropriate jams that would serve her well into her 50s and beyond.

Sonic bids When you are surrounded with those jagged barbs of sheer bloody noise for the first time, do you run for the hills or continue to stick your head in the acid bath? It only takes a few seconds of luxuriating in the stinging audio hailstorm that is A Place To Bury Strangers to know how a young Oliver Ackermann reacted to the noise threshold test.

Alternative Tentacles (2012) In a lot of ways, the legacy of '90s rock is one of sheer ugliness — so many bands found so many ways to make so many genres sound so unrepentantly unattractive, whether it was the sonic miasma that was late-'90s nu-metal or the post-grunge dirty-blues thick sludge that was the prevailing sound of guitar rock throughout the decade.

Twilight of the gods In his keynote speech, informally anointed King of Music, Sir Bruce Springsteen, gave some uncle-ly advice to all the young'uns with their deathmetals and their trollgazes who made up the complicated and chaotic mass that was this year's SXSW talent pool/conference of musical commodity farmers: he pointed out that a ticket to a show is "a handshake between the artist and the fan."

For all Most musicians, at a certain point, discover a paradox at the center of the whole act of musical creation: that seemingly complex music can be simple, and that making simple music is often a complex process. After all, what do you expect in a medium where mathematics and pure emotion are intertwined?

Drag City (2012) It's a rare thing when you listen to a record and can actually hear drugs spewing from the speakers, but such is the gift of Rad Times Xpress IV , the latest from Jennifer Herrema, the exRoyal Trux chanteuse now doing business as Black Bananas.